


S O S

by jabberish



Category: Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Gen, fall of praxus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-01
Updated: 2020-05-01
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:14:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23951380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jabberish/pseuds/jabberish
Summary: Priya had a beat in this area once
Comments: 6
Kudos: 19





	S O S

There was a dead Decepticon in the ruins of Praxus. Another, rather. That was the eighth one Priya identified in the sector, putting the count just over the plausible size of a single cleaner squad, and squarely at her projected headcount for Cons patrolling this sector today. Cause of death matched the others, a single large-caliber round. He was cold and limp, past release of rigor mortis, but with no more than a day’s worth of ash on him. Likely died sometime overnight. 

Priya radioed into the officer’s channel. “Magnus, this is Prowl. Over”

She eyed the bullet wound again, considered the spread and positioning of the previous bodies. Likely died yesterday, while there was enough light for a sniper to operate.

 _::Prowl, this is Magnus, go ahead.::_

Ash in the air choked visibility down to a city block near the ground. Rubble and slag obscured the ruined skeleton of the lively mixed-zone neighborhood they were in. It would be unrecognizable, but Priya had a beat in this area once, and she’d always had an excellent memory. She thought she might envy her teammates, who probably never saw the city alive and couldn’t currently see the ghosts of dense storefronts and vibrant gardens.

“Magnus, this is Prowl. We are at the corner of 5th and Oak in sector 6 kilo. Sector is clear. Assigned squads already neutralized by unknown sniper. Do we have a sniper covering this area? Over.”

It took them far too long to get a read on the Con kill squad assignments, and there weren’t nearly enough survivors to keep the geographic data tracking high quality. Priya, though, had been picking through the ashes for the past two days, tracking Con movements with the rest of command, and she knew these streets from a lifetime ago. It’s — useful, currently. 

_::Prowl, this is Magnus. Negative on sniper. Move with caution. Heading decision yours. Over.::_

It had been 100 hours since the last bombing run, almost 300 since the first. Survivors should have been picking their way out of the rubble, running her team down with demands for help, groaning from injuries, anything. Mostly, it was quiet.

They were entering the three hour mark for this sweep, and they had found hundreds of bodies. Finding a dozen more wasn’t worth the risk of sniper fire. But the area was clear. And if there was a sniper — well, then Priya knew there was at least one other person alive in the sector. 

“Preference poll. Stay or go?” she asked her team without looking up. 

Aaron shrugged. “I gotta meet the person who wiped two kill squads.” His casual posture was belied by a grim edge that had been in his tone for days now.

“Stay,” was all their third said. Priya didn’t actually know her real name. They were meant to stick to callsigns on mission, and Priya only met Mirage on mission. 

Good, it was always better for morale when she didn’t have to command people.

“Magnus, this is Prowl. We are continuing to sweep 6 kilo. Heading east for 9th and Oak. Over and out.” There was a school there. The first bombs hit in the middle of the day, and everyone sheltered so tightly that bodies were in workplaces more often than homes.

Priya marked the destination in everyone’s maps and they fanned out. Mirage engaged her cloaking tech. Aaron crossed the street to check over a relatively intact house on their way.

They made it six feet down the street when a sharp breaking sound cracked out, followed by a distant thump. 

Priya ducked behind a pile of rubble before the gunshot consciously registered.

Aaron was down — dead? — she didn’t have a good visual but he wasn’t where he had been and there was debris everywhere breaking her line of sight. She fumbled her earpiece over to short range comms. “Sound off! This is Prowl, fine, sheltered.”

 _::Ironhide, fine. Taking cover. ::_

_::Mirage, fine.::_

Priya released a breath.

“Mirage, do you have eyes on the impact?”

 _::Yes, green storefront at your 11. ::_

It was an extremely wide shot. But the trajectory — with a chill, she realized she wasn’t under proper cover, and rolled to the other side of the collapsed section of wall she’d taken for shelter. 

Another shot rang and a flash of sparks in her peripheral vision marked the impact, through the middle of a stop sign just feet ahead of her. 

There was no blood and she could only assume Mirage was safe. From her new angle she could see Aaron — 

“Ironhide, you’re not covered! Rotate to the car.” Nothing was at a right angle on the street and it was throwing her off, but the shots were from behind, above, one of the buildings on Elm St, she was 85% sure.

If the delay between the first and second was the time between shots then Aaron would have time to move — it wasn’t, the next shot hit almost immediately. Priya flinched. She looked back to Aaron before she could worry about what she would see. He slid into safety behind the car with a muffled whoop. 

Not shot. Where then... there. The stop sign, again. Inches from the previous shot, this time through the — through the S, leaving holes through the O and the S. 

Priya turned to look again at the storefront sign hit by the first shot — it’s Annie’s Cafe, the first word now shot down to Annie’ and a broken ‘S’.

Sniper was friendly.

Priya had been wearing her old Enforcer uniform since she’d arrived in the disaster zone. She wasn’t an actual Enforcer anymore, and technically shouldn’t even be in possession of the uniform, but in the early days of chaos there’d hardly been a moment to return her gear. She was breaking the law, but it had proved invaluable for handling rattled survivors, for settling them down or browbeating them into cooperation as needed. 

She wasn’t sorry to be in uniform. She was not an Enforcer, but she had been, and she had meant it. And what was an Enforcer if not someone who would risk a bullet to save a citizen?

 _::Prowl, what are you doing? Prowl—::_ “Priya get down!” Aaron yelled at her as she pushed herself slowly back to her feet. 

Standing at the stop sign with two bullet holes in it, she identified the marks where the bullets had gone on to hit the street beyond. The street was warped and broken by shelling, so it took a little figuring, but the trajectories clearly indicated a particular high rise apartment building, about a block west.

“5th floor from the top of the high rise to the west,” Mirage commed, but Priya could hear her in double, speaking from somewhere near the first impact. 

“Copy. Approaching. Ironhide, remain in place in case of continued fire.” 

Aaron growled at her and looked like he might make a grab. _::Prowl, that is not how you approach an active sniper. Let Mirage locate—::_

Priya toggled her radio back over to the long range coordination channel as she walked west and waited to make sure the channel was clear.

“Magnus, this is Prowl, over.”

A glance back revealed Aaron striding towards her, so that both of them could get shot, including the man who was far too big for either her or Mirage to drag to safety. She wasn’t sure what else she had expected.

 _::Prowl, this is Magnus, go ahead.::_

“Magnus, this is Prowl. Reporting change of heading. Going to 5th and Elm, survivor SOS received. Over and out.”

They made it another block, Priya moving as quickly as she could without appearing to outright be fleeing Aaron. 

Another shot cut the air. Exhausted or overconfident, Priya didn’t even flinch as she looked over everyone. She was fine, Aaron was fine. “Mirage?”

“Fine.” Mirage was fine. “Impact on the brickwork at your 3.”

It was a lower angle, a different trajectory. A building over. The sniper was moving and wanted to let them know.

“Priya.” While she was tracing the angle, Aaron grabbed her arm and pulled her behind a burnt out car. “How, why am _I_ the one telling _you_ to remember SOP right now?”

“I checked near the bodies of the Cons.” She tried to wrest her arm free. It did not budge. “I found a single stray shot in eight kills. This sniper is friendly.”

Aaron growled a little. He visibly considered physically hauling Priya back to camp before he subsided and released her. 

No more shots hit them before they made it into the parking garage under their new destination building.

The garage was mostly intact. It was filthy with ash and unnaturally silent, but generally, it looked and felt like an ordinary parking garage.

A clatter nearby had Priya and Aaron reaching for weapons on reflex. She was also fairly certain Mirage had had her pistol out and ready since cloaking.

The sound was a rock, skidding along the floor. Priya looked around for the source, and spotted it immediately.

There was a figure waving to them, trotting over from around a barricade. “Hello! Hello, wow you made it just in time! Oh, but not like you were going to miss me, I just mean I just got here, ‘cause I was walking down to meet you but if I had to go any further I wouldn’t’ve so it’s just in time you’re here.”

She was completely coated with ash and wearing a particulate mask and goggles. Priya made out a loose braid that was probably black under the grey, and she had a Con sniper rifle slung over her shoulder as well as a Con officer's pistol held in the hand that wasn't waving. 

She bobbed to a stop a few steps away, wobbling a little like she couldn’t decide if she wanted to get closer or back away. She was a tiny thing, easily under 150 cm. Her hands were shaking as she waved yet again.

“Hi, hi, hi! C'mon up, we really want to be in a nest if it’s at all possible even though I think I got everyone today already, it’s better to be safe, I came down because it's a little hard to find my nest and also I was excited that you were coming near and I know it's not really safe to leave the building but I figured the lobby is probably fine I blocked the extra openings best I could which isn't great for a getaway but I mean all the bad guys have guns so it's not like running in an open space is going to be great anyhow.”

The sniper talked even as she looked between Priya and Aaron, taking in their tense postures and Aaron’s assault rifle. She edged a little towards Priya, who was point anyway. She was supposed to say something. Offer first aid, or confirm identity, or. 

“Hey kiddo,” Aaron said, voice soft. “Ya alone in here?”

Priya squinted a little at the diminutive, but the sniper didn’t seem to mind. 

She nodded and turned to bounce back the way she’d come. “Well, not anymore, right, 'cause you guys are here! Sorry if I'm babbling a bit and sorry if I scared you with the firing thing — I didn't really think about how scary that might be when you didn't know I wasn’t gonna shoot you, which is dumb of me because just the other day, I was thinking wow, even when you’re super used to gunshots and things getting shot it’s _so scary_ when you’re getting shot at, and I know, I _know_ not to shoot towards anything you don’t want to shoot, but like you said I've been alone out here for a while and I saw you and thought you might move on without finding me and that was really scary.” 

The sniper led them into the apartment complex proper. A few corpses made an appearance, swollen and blackened past the point of being worth checking for vitals. The sniper hopped over one without looking and cut into a stairwell. 

“Need a hand with that rifle, there?” Aaron offered as they started up the stairs. “No point in tiring yourself out here.”

The sniper was breathing hard on the stairs, though Priya put that to the non-stop speech as much as a small person with probable injuries hauling a heavy gun. “No thank you sir, I got it. It’s really not so bad once you get used to it. How are you two doing? I've got food and waters and filters and stuff in my nest and you guys gotta check it out.”

Her voice cracked a little as she spoke. Priya suspected she had been breathing dust for a while, mask or not.

“At least I’m pretty sure I’ve got waters in this nest. I was running a little low the other day so I grabbed some on my way out and I don’t think I grabbed all of them but if I did there’s a grocery store down by the mall —”

She chattered non-stop for nine flights of stairs. Through rambling speech increasingly interrupted by shortness of breath, Priya learned that there were no easily found survivors in the mall, the school they’d been headed for, or in any of the office buildings down along 4th street. 

Finally, they left the stairwell into a hallway cluttered with furniture. Drag marks through ash and char trailed back to one particular room, which the sniper stopped at. “— pretty heavy to move, though. I thought I maybe wasn’t going to be able to get the dresser out, even after I took all the clothes out — I wish I hadn’t done that. I figured out later that the clothes don’t actually make a huge difference, it’s more about—”

She turned back to Priya and dropped a thought mid sentence. “—um, feel free to keep your shoes on it's not like I live here or anything and besides you gotta have shoes to get around, right? but I try to keep the nests dust-free much as possible so if you could just shake off — I'll wipe off on the cleaner side of that blanket over there but you don't have to if you're not feeling it, right?”

She pulled off her mask, goggles, and overcoat, somehow without ever fully putting down her rifle. With practiced speed, she shook ash off each, wiped down briskly with a blanket heaped in the hallway, and tossed the gear to a stray chair. She looked young, and at this point it wasn’t even as much of a surprise as Priya wished it were. 

She slipped into the room without waiting for Priya and Aaron to dust off.

Priya caught the door and paused at the threshold. Inside were piles of relatively clean bedding, water and packaged food. Black plastic covered all but a small square of a large window, where a telescope stood pointed at the streets.

“Ta-da,” the sniper beamed at Priya. She was pale, an obvious ethnic Praxian, and her grin showed off a missing premolar. She looked terribly, terribly young. “So, here's the nest! Promise you this wasn't where I was taking shots — that was nearby obviously, otherwise how would you have found me? But it took a while to clean this place up and also it was Mr. Toya's and I really liked Mr. Toya so I double wouldn't want to compromise it completely, right —”

Priya considered and came to the quick conclusion that she would need to ignore and interrupt as necessary.

“What’s your name?” she asked. 

She laughed, and realization clicked in Priya, very late. The sniper lifted her bared arms in display and in the brighter light of the room, Priya saw they were smeared with ash, dirt, and dried blood, all on top of widespread bruising in various shades of healing.

“I'm Blue! Hah! I've been sitting on that for days! 'Cause my name is Blue but also I took a really big fall during an explosion and really I’m lucky to be okay because everyone else died when that happened but I bruise really easily so I'm blue because of all the bruising! I was a little worried it’d be healed before I could tell someone alive, and that —”

“How old are you, Blue?” Blue was not a small woman. He was a boy, a child. Maybe a teen.

“Huh? Oh, um, eleven. How old are — oh sorry, you’re not supposed to ask adults. Why is that anyway? I guess it’s less interesting when —”

Aaron nudged past her, barefaced and slightly less covered in ash than he’d been. “Blue, are you bleeding or really sore any—”

Blue lept backwards, drew his pistol, clicked the safety off, and pointed it at Aaron. His hands stopped shaking, for the first time since they’d seen him.

Aaron stopped and slowly, calmly, opened and raised his hands. It was only a moment before Blue’s eyes went wide and he pointed the gun down and to the side. 

“Oh whoops, I’m so sorry!” He said, clicking the safety back and forth — off, on, off, on — “That was so rude of me! Oh no, no I’m sorry, you just startled me, I know you’re not a Con because you’re with an Enforcer and maybe it’s ‘cause you look Kaonite but really, you just startled me, you seem nice, right?” 

“Hey, hey, it’s ok kid.” Aaron was a soft touch with kids. Priya suspected he was going to be haunted by the look on this one. She was, and no one had ever accused her of being sensitive.

The sound of the stairwell door opening interrupted them. “Hello? Are you over here?” Mirage called with a good imitation of innocent disorientation.

Priya winced at the transparent ploy. Blue whirled at the voice, stepping sideways to try to get a view through the doorway. Aaron went for Blue’s pistol. 

Aaron moved fast and Priya only managed to cut him off because she knew it was coming. As it was, when she shoved in front of him, she nearly got thrown to the ground before Aaron regained his balance and caught them both.

Blue was backed all the way into the room and had his pistol aimed up again. “What’s going on? Who’s that? What did you just do?”

Aaron carefully inserted himself in front of Priya. “Woah, woah, nothing, easy. We’re here to help. We’re just a little jumpy that you’ve got two guns here.”

Priya elbowed past Aaron. “Stand down,” she snapped at him. “Wipe your feet and get in here, Mirage!” she snapped over her shoulder, deliberately turning her back to the sniper.

She eased her tone as much as she could before facing back to Blue. “He was trying to take your pistol. It will be slightly more complicated bringing you back fully armed.”

“Oh,” Blue chewed his — badly chapped, bleeding — lip without looking away from Priya. “I, um, well, it took me a really long time to get a L-series, and it’s pretty much the best rifle —”

Priya backed up an assumption. “You do wish to come to camp with us, right?”

His eyes widened. The pistol dropped and he clicked the safety on immediately. “Wow, yes, no you're right, I can leave the guns, I know they make people nervous, and I know, I know why they make us do so much gun safety and gun respect stuff at the range — well not every range, but all the good ones, and if you’re serious about precision riflery you go to the good —”

Priya cut him off with a gesture. “It’s fine. Grab what you need. Don’t worry about basic gear, we’ll give it to you. Assume you’re not coming back.”

Mirage finally stepped into the room, in time for Priya to catch a slightly disapproving look. Insubordinate.

“You mean it?” Blue looked between them, rapidly regaining the excitement he’d shown on first meeting them. “I need to grab a few things, I mean, I don’t really need them, I guess, but then I...” 

Priya nodded. “We will take care of you.”


End file.
